Usage of My Game Again

Some usage metrics for my game (again)

My game has been available for free (fully free with no ads or anything) for a little over 3 weeks.

It is possible to identify some common usage patterns based on the players who've played the game since that time.

I will give mainly percentages since the actual raw numbers don't mean a great deal.

The main figure that keeps cropping up is a figure between 4% and 5%.

4%-5% is the proportion of users who are quite engaged with my game.

About 4% of users play the game beyond a few days.  The other 96% play it for one day only.

About 5% of users play a good number of battles.

Each day about 25-30% of users on that day give the game a decent play of about 10 minutes or more (which I consider a decent playthrough for a mobile game).

Each day about 15% of my total users ever are playing the game.  This equates to about 50 or 60 users every day playing the game with about 20 new users each day.

The typical users launches the game a number of times over the course of about 2 or 3 days.

Each day there are one or two users who launch the game over 15 times a day with the majority hovering around 5 launches per day.

My users are split fifty fifty between those who play a session more than 5 minutes and less than 5 minutes.

Most battles are watched for the full length of the battle although a handful are also watched for much longer - I had one person watch a battle almost 40 minutes once, and they watched most of the battles for a good 15 minutes - so they were massively engaged by the game.

Most users play at least 1 battle, sometimes 2.  I've had one user play 65 battles in the campaign and a number fight over 15 battles in the campaign.

The majority of users lose their battles against the AI.  I sometimes wonder if this puts them off because the game is quite hard.  The AI does not cheat but is extremely intelligent (now) and users do struggle to defeat the AI. In fact so do I.

From what I can tell from my usage metrics most users have a good idea how to play the game.  At first I was worried that they were not going to the AI behaviour screen but these days I can see that most users have no problem setting AI settings and so forth for their ships. The game seems to be used correctly by most users, they are just not very good at it and don't often try to improve their skills.

The Lite edition has suffered since making the Full version free.  Usage of the Lite game has dropped from over 2 days per person to 1.5 days per person. It is clear to me that the lite version is being uninstalled and then the full version installed in many cases.

I've had about 400 users of the full since it was released - so for 5% of them to be heavily engaged indicates about 20 users are heavily engaged at any time currently, this is about right.

My usage metrics are increasing. If we take the usage over the last 3 weeks - the number of launches of the game has almost doubled per day on average in that time and yet the actual number of installs per day has only increased by about 25% per day since that time. (Averaging 15 per day install increased to about 20 per day, but an increase in launches from 150 per day to about 300 per day approximately).  I am pleased with this as it suggests that the game is retaining users at a reasonable level.